A downtown hotel project overlooking Centennial Olympic Park is designed, permitted, and carrying a franchise flag. What it does not have is anyone to build it.
Marcus & Millichap has listed the .8-acre site at 355 Centennial Olympic Park Drive, where a 14-story Residence Inn by Marriott is approved and ready to proceed. The asking price for the land plus the permitted plans is $14.5 million, and the listing markets the property as sitting in Atlanta's hotel zone and being “completely construction ready, with full construction plans permitted and entitlements in place.” The parcel is a former gravel lot that has been fenced off and barely used for years.
The plans approved by the City of Atlanta call for 188 rooms on the top seven floors, with the bottom five stories given over to 129 parking spaces and EV charging, wrapped in a perforated screen. Niles Bolton Associates, the Atlanta firm behind the interior, exterior, and landscape design, added a street-level bar and restaurant space for a third-party operator, a pool deck over Ivan Allen Jr. Boulevard, and a terrace facing the park. Many of the rooms would look out over the Georgia Aquarium, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, and World of Coca-Cola. Mercedes-Benz Stadium, where World Cup matches will be played, is a mile away.
Houston-based High End Investments filed for building permits in early 2023 and then appears to have backed away, which would have been the company's first Atlanta project. High End paid $3.8 million for the parcel, a steep discount from the $10.5 million it traded for in pre-recession 2008. A 10-story Candlewood Suites was briefly floated for the same corner before the pandemic killed it.
If built, the hotel would stand three stories shorter than Kaplan Residential's 17-story Generation Atlanta apartments next door, which finished in the summer of 2020 with 336 rentals and sold the following year for a downtown record. It would also join a cluster of hospitality that has filled in fast around the park: the 22-story Margaritaville resort condo building opened in 2022 with 200 suites, Signia by Hilton delivered nearly 1,000 rooms earlier this year, Centennial Yards expects to finish its 229-room Anthem hotel next year, and the 13-story, 183-room Moxy Centennial Olympic Park is scheduled to open in the second quarter of 2026.
That density is the context for the listing. With so many rooms coming online around the same park before the same tournament, a builder taking on a shovel-ready site now would be entering a market that several larger operators have already committed to filling.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published August 2024.
